In my last entry I gave instructions on how to clean up Photohostess links by editing them. That is no longer necessary. I have created a page that you can enter your image url, which will give you a working image link to copy.

There is also a second form which will generate a working link. So you can use it to create HTML code for payment mail buttons, image links to your blog, or whatever you want.

There is a third form you can use to create text links.

You must enter naked links with no tags. There should be no spaces in your links. If you miscopy, it will create HTML code for you that just won’t work. If you are making payment mail buttons, copy the plain HTML link from the window that comes up after you create or edit your payment mail button, not the popup that links from the payment mail index and provides you with a gray payment mail button code.

These are standard links. They will work with any text or image anywhere you need an HTML image or link code on the web. They will not modify your image size for you.

Photohostess link generator

You have a choice here, but either way you have to do some editing.

You can take the hotlink for websites code, and remove the link (shown in red):

<a href="http://photohostess.com/etc…"><img src=”http://photohostess.com/etc…></a>

Or you can take the direct link and turn it into an image link by adding the parts in green here:

<img src="http://photohostess.com/etc…">

Also see How to host an image on Niteflirt.

1. Keywords you choose should reflect the page you have used them on.
2. These keywords should be used as much as possible in the following locations:
   • URL – yes, a domain that contains your top keyword is going to score you points with Google for that keyword;
   • Page title;
   • Meta tags in your document head:
     • <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″ />
     • <meta name=”description” content=”(page description)” />
   • Throughout normal page text, including headings, paragraphs, and alt tags on photos.

If you have a chance to buy a url with your main keyword in it (without making the url ungodly long), do it. I have a url containing a keyword that loads of people use in long lists. But I bought the url and I’m on top.

So a lot of you are probably thinking, “That seems like a lot of trouble. I don’t really want to pin myself down like that. I’ll put a long list that I found someplace in the keywords instead.”

Nope. The fewer keywords, the better. Your page isn’t about hundreds of different topics. It’s about one or two, which can each be described in a few keywords. The Google spider will look at your keywords and see how many times they were used in a natural manner on a page. If not at all, they won’t count at all.

If you’ve really got 100 specialties, your main page should have keywords that are generally about that. Then you should dedicate a page to each specialty to give it a good chance at getting rated well. Subcategory pages are good, too. Just make sure you have clear navigation for both the spider and your customers.

Still seems like a lot of trouble? Perhaps you should narrow down what you’re all about. You really can’t be everything to everybody.

1. You get essentially free traffic from being highly placed in a Google search;
2. There are things you can do to improve your position on a search page.

I will probably post something about what you can do in the future. What I’m talking about today is making the kind of SEO mistakes that can get you in trouble with Google. In fact, if Google looks at your page and thinks you tried to pull a fast one, you can get banned by Google, and you won’t come up in a search at all for maybe 6 months until it expires – if it does.

Doing something to fake out Google has a name: it’s called Black Hat SEO. Shady companies do it to take the chance that they will shoot up to the top and not get caught. Or more frequently, companies that hire shady SEO consultants. The company trying to improve its placement is the one that gets caught, not the shady consultant. The shady consultant just drops the sandboxed company’s name from his list of clients and goes on to work for more unwitting clients.

Here’s one big issue: keywords. You pick your keywords, which are the words or phrases you are hoping that google will pick you up in a search on, and you put them into the header in a meta tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword #1, keyword #2″ />

Google will look at the keywords you have chosen, then look at your entire page (as well as the site) to determine whether your keywords represent your content. If the only time you use a keyword is in the meta tag, the spider that is indexing your page will decide it really isn’t very important to your site at all. The more keywords you use, the less important each one will look. So if you have an enormous list of keywords, hardly any of which appear in the page content, Google will think at best that only the ones that are repeated on the page count. At worst, you may be tagged as a cheater and your domain sandboxed.

Other ways to cheat badly: using the same keyword over and over again in the meta tag.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex” />

Cheating!

Another way to get yourself sandboxed is to put a huge list of words and phrases in tiny or invisible font the same color as the page background. They can tell you are doing that. Really. You’re out of there. I see this all over Niteflirt, and half the time the keywords include at least one tos violation. So you are taking the risk of hurting Niteflirt on Google while getting yourself suspended. Not smart. Read up on SEO. There are tons of tutorials out there.

Seriously, sometime in the past this flirt came to my site to read a tutorial and lifted this button

to use in mass quantity on at least 4 of her Niteflirt listings.

She hates me, that’s for certain. She is sure I am out to get her. She is terribly upset that people report her for tos violations, and she is sure it is ME. The problem isn’t that the tos violations are there. That can’t be it. People have no right to see those violations or report them.

She is convinced I spend no time whatever working on my dozens of domains and projects, and all my time combing through her listings. She has repeatedly announced in the forum that I am an employee of Niteflirt. She demands live answers from Customer Service concerning things that are known issues, and she get irate and goes ballistic when anyone actually tries to help her.

She announced she was willing to pay $100 to a designer for 5 custom designs for her live listings, and maybe 1 template to be used for her recorded listings. That is not a generous offer. What she is requesting is probably worth 3 times what she wants to pay.

Oh, yes. She told us she is smart businesswoman.

So I looked at what she has. When looking at the recorded listings, it was hard for me to miss my button. Not only was it fresh in my mind for having made the tutorial and looked at it quite a few times since, but damn. It has my character’s initials on it. I marked it to keep people from stealing.

I posted what I had found – the two buttons side by side (she had blacked out the shadow so she could use it with a dark background), and a greatly reduced thumbnail of one of the listings, showing how many copies she had used.

I left it for a while. Other girls responded, calling her on what she had done. Thanks, Kitty. Then I guess she looked back to see if any crack designers had taken her up on her generous offer. She went ballistic, screaming in huge font, magenta text, interspersed with profanities, insults, lame excuses, and an arrogant sense of privilege way beyond her intrinsic worth as a human being.

Her arguments were:

1. This is a help site, therefore by default everything is available for use;
2. I sent her to this site when she asked for help which I had put in a tutorial, and this gave her my implicit consent to use any or all of my graphic content;
3. She got away with it for so long that the statute of limitations had run out, and I had no right to complain;
4. Since she is convinced that I comb through her listings at least daily, I must have known she was using them, which would be *of course* implied consent or at least takes away my right to complain;
5. I did not label the particular graphic that it could not be lifted or used, nor did it say anywhere on the site that my graphics are not available.
6. The watermark on the button meant that anyone could use it;
7. Anybody who looks at something and finds a violation is being nosey, vindictive, or both, which makes the violator the victim.

Nope.

She even gave me a bizarre “You’re a fucking piece of shit and I’m truly sorry I did it.” LOLOL. Right. Professionalism at its finest.

My shtick is that all women are superior to all men. Yeah, I’m only kidding.

Upload your photo as a profile thumbnail. When the listing is saved, click on the thumbnail to enlarge it in a popup. Right-click to copy the url. Put it in an excel file or text file somewhere safe, so you don’t lose the link. Now put it in a regular image tag:

<img src=”http://i.niteflirt.com…etc.”>

Even if you change the thumbnail, the image will stay hosted. Wasn’t that easy?

There are 2 different kinds of optimization I’m going to write about here and in upcoming articles.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO), making your site friendly to search engines, so they will present it to searchers;
2. User optimization, or making your site as easy for your user to find what he’s looking for as possible.

There’s a ton of stuff out there to read about search engine optimization. Getting your site seen on Page 1 of search engines is better than advertising in a lot of ways. While companies do pay good money for specialists to perform this service for them, it is possible for someone with a small site to learn to do it themselves. If you do it yourself, that is free advertising.

There is less information out there about user optimization. The deal is, if you pay for advertising or put a lot of work into getting searchers to visit your site, do you know what to do to maximize the chances of them finding what they were looking for?

So right now I want to talk a bit about making your site user-friendly.

The most important rule in designing a website is that your users should be able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. They should be able to see immediately what the purpose of the page they have landed on is, and they should be able to see where they can go from there without scrolling around or clicking. Then, when they click the link that looks like it is going to take them where they want to go, they should end up exactly where they expected to be.

If surfers don’t see what they are looking for within a few seconds, they will click away and find some other site to look at.

Example: If you have a phone sex site, you may have a warning page the surfer will have to click past before getting to your main page. Is there any content on it that gives the surfer a reason to keep going, or is there a scroll box with legalistic mumbo-jumbo? Look at it critically. Does your main page have XXX rated photos on it? No? Then get rid of that warning page. Make the photos on the entry page R-rated and provide enough information on it so that anyone landing on it will know what they have found, so they can either leave or continue.

Making the user click past a pointless entry page is causing your site to lose customers before they even find your content.

Now, open your main page. Close your eyes. Now open them again. What is the most noticeable element on your main page? Is it clear without reading anything that it is probably a phone sex site they have landed on and are about to enter?

Is there anything that has been added to the page that distracts from that idea? Is there a big block of dense text talking about…something? Move it to its own page.

Presumably you have links to other pages. There might be a “gallery” page, “about me”, “blog”, “news”, “links”. How easy is it for the visitor to find the links to navigate to those other pages? Is there an obvious navigation bar, or are there some links or buttons here or there?

Once there, how easy is it for the visitor to get back or visit another page?

Is anything cluttered? There are sitebuilders out there that make it easy for users to randomly jam odds and ends into their pages. Resist the temptation. Don’t do it.

Where do you have a “call to action”, telling the visitor what to do, ie, “call me!”? On every page?

You need to think about all these things, because your visitor does not intend to spend any time thinking at all. Think about it.

If you need to clean up your website, get to it!

<body border=”0″style=”background-color:black;”>

Leave the spacing exactly as it is.

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Spreadsheet.xls